She smiled to herself as she skimmed the article.
"How did you guess?" he said after a minute of silence.
She looked up from the newspaper.
"About this?" she said, widening her eyes innocently and indicating the article.
He rolled his eyes.
"No."
The corner of her mouth quirked.
"I'm a healer," she said, then glanced down at her wrists. "Or I was, at least. I specialised in healing dark magic. I know the signs of magical corrosion. Too much of certain kinds of dark magic and it turns to poison in the body. The body and the magic try to assimilate it. Once there's dark magic at a cellular level, there's no going back. The magic eats the body from the inside out."
She set the newspaper aside. "The magic is still highly potent of course. He's still one of the most powerful wizards in the world. But physically he's deteriorating. Even all that unicorn blood he's imbibing and bathing in can't sufficiently manage the symptoms. Lying in a torpor under a nest of snakes is just delaying the inevitable. Even if he's immortal, he'll be little more than a shade soon. He'll fade into ether. With Harry dead, he has no way to rebirth himself again. If all his horcruxes have been destroyed — he'll just — cease to exist."
Malfoy looked at her sharply and she met his eyes.
"The tethers, they're called horcruxes aren't they?" she asked.
He nodded slowly.
"New memory?" he said.
She nodded.
"During the seizure," she said, leaning back in her chair. "The Order was hunting them. Ron and Harry were assigned to."
"Anything else?" he said, his voice low and dangerous.
"Ron was upset about the casualty rates. We were starving. I doubt it's anything you don't already know," she said quietly.
She looked up at him steadily, expecting him to immediately move to invade her mind. To verify it. He just stared at her.
She looked away. After a minute she glanced back up, hesitating.
He noticed her attention and inclined his head, arching an eyebrow.
"Kingsley Shacklebolt..." she said. "Hannah didn't mention him. Everyone keeps saying that I'm all that's left of the Order, but I don't remember—"
"He died a few months before the final battle," Malfoy said, looking away from her. His jaw rolled slightly.
Hermione had known — but she still felt a sharp ache in her chest when she heard the confirmation.
She felt sure she already knew the answer to her next question too.
"Were you the one who—?"
He met her eyes and nodded. "He was in my way."
Chapter End Notes
Hermione stared down at the square of paper she was holding in bewilderment.
She furrowed her eyebrows as she folded it in half, and then stopped, feeling at a loss.
She couldn't remember how to fold an origami crane.
She'd folded more than a thousand of them. Large and small. Day after day. She had distinct memories of folding them.
But somehow—
She couldn't remember how to do it anymore. She'd kept trying to, each morning after she read the newspaper, but somehow she couldn't figure out how to make them anymore.
She couldn't remember the order of the folds. Was it a diagonal fold first? Maybe she was supposed to fold it in half and then again? She tried both ways.
She couldn't remember. The knowledge was — gone.
She had none of her previously folded cranes to look over in order to reverse engineer the process. The elves always banished them all by the end of the day.
Hermione sighed to herself and set the paper aside.
It must have been lost during her seizure. Perhaps there had been brain damage.
The memory — the knowledge — had vanished from wherever she'd kept it. Like it had never existed. Except she knew it had. She remembered, distinctly, of being able to fold them.
No matter.
She didn't even know why she folded cranes. She couldn't remember when she'd learned it. Maybe in primary school...
She pulled on her cloak and headed outside.
The estate was dreary and muddy. Winter was giving its last gasps before spring. The windows were occasionally tinged with frost in the morning, but the days warmed and it rained in sheets for days at a time.
The rain was only coming down lightly so Hermione ventured forth.
She had gotten to the point that she could traverse most of the gardens surrounding the manor; as long as it wasn't too open. Open spaces she still couldn't handle.
When she occasionally tried to force herself past the hedges and into the open, rolling hills, she felt as though someone were dissecting her; slicing her nerves out of her body and laying them out in cold and the wind. Her mind would just fold in on itself and leave her alone in a state of stark terror.
She couldn't — couldn't manage.